Big update to Google+ Hangouts brings games, phone calls, and more

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By far the most impressive part of Google+ is the free, multi-user chat service known as Hangouts. You can chat with up to nine people during which you can collaborate on documents or share your screen, and you can do it from a computer, iOS, or Android device. It is by far the most versatile free tool for video chat and collaboration.

Late last week Google pushed a big update to the Hangout experience, enabling a new arsenal of features to entice new users to give the video service a shot.

Add a phone call to your Hangout

With Hangouts, Google has put their best foot forward in offering up a handy service that many users would never know they needed. In addition to being able to invite other users to a Hangout, now it is possible to call someone from the Hangout. When you open the Invite tab, there’s an option to call a phone number. The phone call can be heard by everyone in the Hangout, and vice versa. This is perfect for a small business meeting, or for a family phone call. The phone number is masked from the other users in the Hangout as well, so you aren’t sharing the call with anyone. If you leave the Hangout, even if other people are still inside, the call drops (if you initiated the call).

It should come as no surprise that this is using Google Voice, and the call is placed using the Voice account of whoever dialed the number. If you don’t already have a voice account, you are walked through the registration process and assigned a number. The Hangout call uses the same low billing rates for international calls, making this an even better utility for both conference calls and family meetings. The quality of the calls in the Hangout is exactly the same as if you were using Gmail to make a phone call, since all of these services function under the same Google plugin for voice and video.

Apps, but mostly games

Most people have the exact same experience the first time they use a webcam. Once you get over how cool it is that this technology works, you start pushing buttons. In the early webcam days, that meant silly masks and image overlays. Google has taken that nostalgia and strapped it onto a series of productivity apps and games for use within the Hangout. There’s a whole app dedicated to software face masks and silly overlays, and a handful of more “adult” apps as well. These include the Google Docs app, a virtual whiteboard and doodling app, and of course virtual poker.

The Aces Hangout app allows anyone in the Hangout to pull up a chair and be dealt into the game. Virtual money is exchanged back and forth as players win and lose, and there’s an option to throw some real money on the table if you feel like you’ve lost enough virtual money. In case you don’t have the perfect poker face, or access to any number of clever facial distractions, Aces offers you a handful of software face masks that allow you to come to the table with your game face on.

The Hangout APIs have been available for a little while now, so it is expected that there will be more games and apps added in short order. There’s no talk about this service being mixed in with things like the Chrome Web Store, or even the Google+ Games tab at the moment. When you install an app in a hangout it gets installed like a Chrome Extension, but is gone as soon as you leave the Hangout. Perhaps as this evolves, so will the integration with the rest of Google’s web game and app services.

Final Thoughts

Google has an incredibly powerful tool with Hangouts. There’s no reason not to use it — they work well on a wide variety of hardware and the ability to participate in the hangout from a phone, tablet, or a phone call means there’s never an excuse to miss that meeting. As more groups — whether they are businesses, organizations, political activists, or anyone else — continue to use the service, Google+ will also continue to grow.

At the moment, even most paid video chat services struggle to be as functional as Google’s Hangouts. This isn’t surprising, given that the history of the software comes from a need to have trans-continental meetings at Google. The evolution from an internal solution to an external product brings with it the time that was spent making the software functional internally, which is a breath of fresh air from Google’s public beta test mentality for many of their products.